Viva la Vida
by Stephane Richer
Summary: once you go there was never, never an honest word, but that was when I ruled the world


Viva La Vida

Disclaimer: I don't own Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" or Ai Yazawa's _Nana_.

It's all in the past tense now, isn't it? You steady your breath, shade your eyes from the weak London morning light as you lie in bed, cigarette dangling lazily from your lips, and the smoke dissipating into the fog outside the open window. Yeah, it's all _has been, used to, would have,_ when you know it wasn't and never could be but who the hell cares, anyway? An empty head on the radio, a mirror that does not look back with a higher pitch and a Stepford smirk not quite identical to your own…anything else is just a memory, tainted and bent by the light of time and your own head.

And yet, in your head, it's there, the voice, the cigarette hanging the same way, loose (he never paid attention) and the calloused hands lightly touching your arm like the neck of a guitar (you feel the familiar A minor, C major, F major, E7, and then something of his own creation, sometimes a melody, sometimes a chord progression) and these phantoms will never stop haunting you in your dreams and in your waking hours. Always.

In Reality (such a funny word, a funny place) you're Ichinose Takumi, the rock star who wears socks knitted by his estranged wife and lives in a foreign country where most people don't know his name. But in the true reality, not the one made by smoke and warped mirrors, you're just another lonely man, lost forever.

And the worst part is that having him back would solve nothing. There would still be your wife and your mistresses; you'd still have to lie to all of them and make things even more complicated—especially with _her_, because the three of you would be wedged together again and again. And you're a father now; you have two growing children who would know, just the way they know about everything else. They are, after all, your children—sharp and sure, though they may not act that way all the time.

And yet it haunts you. It still haunts you. Fingertips caress your hair, and you get it cut shorter and shorter each time but they remain, smoothing and raking and gentle. Your mouth feels the phantom of dry, deathlike lips on your own that are very much alive. Calluses touch calluses, ghostlike guitar hands on solid guitar hands.

You are next to nothing without him, and it kills you. It eats you from inside like a parasite, a hungry insect, multiplying swiftly. You cannot feel the whimpering females beneath you as your insides rupture. They scream your name, and perhaps once this could have brought you pleasure. It has become just a waste of time now. Why bother? You don't need her to sing, and you don't need any of the others for any purpose—God knows they could satisfy their primal urges with any man.

And you search for one man in particular, and it is against your nature to hope. And yet you hope, even after seeing his body, blood still warm, limbs and face mangled beyond repair, even after that, you hope. You hope to see him coming through the fog, guitar in one hand and cigarette in the other, eyes bright and not heavy like they had been, should not have been, would not have been if you had taken better care of him—but this is not a game of blame. This is a game of the rise and fall of your chest, your hoarse breath, your shaking hands and dark eyes. This is you and Ren's long limbs splayed out over you, the sweet smell of tobacco lingering on your face and body, of sacred hands still stretched in the air, toward some kind of heavenly thing.

This is all just some kind of dream, some kind of trance, are you awake even? Yes. You're firmly in the present, in London, the part of London where you traced your hands over the scars upon scars on top of Ren's bare back and where he mewled like a kitten and arched his slender body at the touch of your long fingers on his delicate ribs that held him in there like a birdcage, the heart beating with strong wings, too large and mighty for something so limiting and where you felt like a king with Ren as your queen and where the taste of your cigarettes mixed with the taste of his until you could decipher no borderline and where he stared back at you with the same look you always gave him.

The mirror shattered and you never tried to pick up the pieces, just lay there on the floor next to it, curious. You never helped, never tried, did you, Takumi? You were a leader, but a leader who left every man for himself, and what kind of leader does that? What kind of lover does that? Did you really love him if you could not give him your everything? Was your everything actually the scraps you gave him?

Yes, you loved him, needed him, to feel him on you, in you, to feel yourself on him, in him, around him, to be in a room that smelled like him on sheets that felt like him, to breathe his oxygen, yes. You needed him. You loved him. You need him. You love him. Why is that so damn hard sometimes? You want to kick something over, the way you used to, never can now, you want a baseball bat to smash the windows with, and this time no hall monitors can stop you. You want to search this earth for anything that is left of him, any small and insignificant thing, but nothing is insignificant to you. He was your everything, is your everything, and you can just sigh and watch the ceiling peel.

You are Takumi Ichinose, master of women and king of rock and roll. You are Takumi Ichinose, leader and lover and father, responsible and on top of everything, ruthless. You are Takumi Ichinose, lonely. You used to be something, maybe. You wonder what he would have been.


End file.
